We’d imagined that shortly after our son was born, we’d hit the road within a couple weeks. In truth, our first trip (to the US and Mexico) was when he was 2.5 months old, and we just barely got all of his documents in order for the trip to be possible.
If you’re heading into the great wide open, you’ve got a bureaucratic schlep ahead of you. When your kid is born, depending on country, you’re going to have to wait on a number things to be sorted out before you hit the road. Our son is a tripple citizen (German, US and Serbian), so we had to deal with three countries-worth of bureaucracy in parallel. Here’s basically the timeline that we had to go through:
German passport
- 2 weeks waiting on birth certificate
- 7 additional weeks waiting on official confirmation of German citizenship (based on my permanent residence)
- Same day processing of children’s passport (not valid for all countries)
We booked our appointment for the children’s passport at the town hall even before we had all of the documents available. In the end, we had to show up at a government office two days before our passport appointment (which in Berlin usually have to be booked a month in advance) to complain that they still hadn’t produced official documentation of my son’s German citizenship nine weeks after his birth. We got the document the following day, mostly, we think, because of a Yugo-bonus since the person working at the foreigner’s office was also an ethnic Serb.
US passport
- 2 weeks waiting on (German) birth certificate
- 4 weeks waiting on appointment for registration of birth abroad
- 2 more weeks waiting on US passport
This was the fastest. My son’s US passport was in-hand almost exactly two months after he was born.
Serbian passport
For Serbia at first we just registered the birth with the embassy since Serbia isn’t as picky about Serbian citizens traveling to Serbia on foreign passports. We waited to get our son’s Serbian passport until we were in Serbia a few months later.
Why Deal With All Of These Up Front?
If you’re a citizen of a country, your children usually obtain your citizenship automatically, even if you never file any documents with the embassy. This is an important note: registering your child does not make them a citizen. Nationallity is conferred upon birth automatically; passports and birth certificates are just documentation of such.
If your child is a citizen of multiple countries, as our son is, most countries do not allow them to enter or leave the country on foreign documents. In other words, for a trip to the US with our son, he was legally required to enter and leave the EU with his German passport and legally required to enter and leave the US with his American passport. The US is particularly strict about such and the fines are in the thousands of dollars.
Don’t expect that you’ll leave the hospital and head straight for the airport, especially if you’re living abroad or your child has multiple citizenships. Plan for a month or two of bureaucratic stuff up front, which isn’t terrible since some of that will be spent recovering from birth, learning the ropes of infant parenting and accommodating a deluge of visitors.